Monday, July 15, 2019

Otago's academics know what's best for us, so let's put them in charge

The thought often occurs to me that New Zealand could save
itself a whole lot of money and political argy-bargy by simply handing over the
governance of the country to the academics of Otago University.

They know exactly what needs to be done. They never tire of
telling us. Barely a week passes without one of their number pointing how simple
it would be, using regulatory tools, to create a Utopia here in our remote
corner of the Pacific.

If only we listened to their advice, New Zealand would be a fairer,
safer, healthier and more equal society. (Not freer, though, because freedom can
get in the way of Utopian visions and must be strictly controlled by people who
know what’s best for us.)

For starters, if we listened to the Otago academics, we
wouldn’t be a nation of drunks and fatties. Marketers of alcohol and unhealthy food
would be made to stand in the naughty corner. But alas, we’re all at the mercy of greedy, manipulative capitalists
and politicians who are too cowardly, or possibly venal, to do the right thing.

We’ve been reminded of this – yet again – over the past few
days by the indefatigable Professor Doug Sellman and a bright-eyed colleague
named Simon Adamson, who appears to have taken over from Sellman as director of
Otago University’s National Addiction Centre. Their message is that the government, by refusing to act on the
mental health inquiry’s recommendations for tighter alcohol controls, is
pandering to liquor industry lobbyists. "You gotta follow the money and ask who's benefiting from the status quo," Adamson told Newshub.

Health minister David Clark brusquely dismissed the claim, saying
he refused to dignify it with a response. Well, of course he’d say that; he’s obviously
in the pocket of the liquor barons and their shadowy propagandists. What else
could you expect?

Another tireless moral crusader is Professor Kevin Clements,
who is described on the Otago University website as the founding director of
the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. (One of the things
universities do very well, along with generous sabbaticals, mutual
back-scratching through academic exchanges and endless rounds of
taxpayer-funded international conferences, is the creation of grandly titled institutes for the pursuit of
ideological hobby-horses.)

One of Clements’ shticks is gun control, so it was no
surprise when he popped up at the weekend in a radio report about the
government’s gun buyback programme. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that
New Zealanders own twice as many firearms per capita as Australians and six
times as many as Britons, “so on a per capita basis New Zealand is a fairly
overgunned society” – the clear implication being that we’re dangerously addicted
to firearms and for our own safety, we need much stricter controls.

But hang on a minute. Surely the crucial consideration is
not how many guns New Zealanders own, but how often they are used to kill
people or commit other criminal acts. That’s what matters.

Here the statistics are interesting. Wikipedia, which publishes
what appear to be reputable figures on gun ownership and related crime,
confirms that New Zealand has a high rate of gun ownership, as you’d expect in
a country with a substantial rural population and a large hunting community.

But while we own 30 firearms per 100 people, which is high
by world standards, our rate of firearm-related deaths (including suicides) is
low: 1.07 per 100,000.

The figures make it clear there is little or no co-relation
between gun ownership and deaths caused by firearms, other than, perhaps, in
the US, where there are 120 firearms per 100 people and 19.5 gun-related
fatalities per 100,000.

Australia has 14 guns per 100 people – half as many as New
Zealand, as Clements said; yet its firearms-related death rate, at 1.04, is only
microscopically lower than ours. Other comparisons can be made with Norway (31
guns per 100 people, 1.75 deaths per 100,000), Switzerland (24 guns per 100,
3.01 deaths per 100,000) and Canada (25 guns per 100, 2.05 deaths per 100,000).
In other words, despite Clement’s alarmist pronouncement, New Zealand measures
up very favourably.

On the other hand, Venezuela has a much lower rate of reported
gun ownership than New Zealand (18 per 100 people) yet a death rate even higher
than that of the US, at 26.48 per 100,000. And then there’s El Salvador, often
described as the world’s most dangerous country: 12 guns per 100 people, 44.45
deaths per 100,000.

Even allowing for the possibility that statistics from some
of these countries may not be totally reliable, it’s clear that firearm
ownership figures on their own, such as those cited by Clements, are virtually
meaningless. I wonder, does it ever occur to credulous journalists, most of whom
have university degrees so have presumably been taught critical thinking, to
challenge supposed experts over the simplistic and misleading use of
statistics?

Evidently not. They have been ideologically programmed not
to challenge the left-wing orthodoxy that prevails in universities, where
indoctrination and conformist group-think have supplanted intellectual inquiry and academic
rigour.

To return to my opening thought, just think how much simpler
life would be if academics were given the power to rule us. The great appeal of
their regulatory prescriptions for society is that they don’t have to be weighed
against public opinion or put to the test in the real world. Neither are academics
bothered by inconvenient notions such as the right of individuals to make their
own choices about how they live, all of which can make parliamentary democracy untidy
and quarrelsome.

Academics aren’t constrained by accountability either,
because they don’t have to answer to anyone. Unlike politicians, they don’t
have to worry about incurring the resentment of the people who pay their salaries
and risk being tossed out of office.

Perhaps most appealing of all, if academics governed us there
would be none of the acrimony which characterises parliamentary rule, since
they all appear to agree with each other.

7 comments:

How right you are, Karl : "Academics - left wing orthodoxy - indoctrination and conformist group-think, supplanting intellectual inquiry and academic rigour". Universities used to be bastions of free speech and fearless fresh thinking - but they are now, in all our western world, succumbing to group-think, intolerant of everybody else's opinions. And look, for example, at the abominable way New Zealand students mindlessly screamed and banged on drums to prevent our distinguished elder statesman, mild-mannered and ever polite Don Brash, from presenting his opinions to an audience of many hundreds who had come precisely to hear what he had to say. It was a disgusting spectacle. Agreed-to, mindless group-think and political correctness are now the hallmarks of academia.

Sellman drives me to drink only he's frustratingly tight-lipped about where all the 'cheap booze' is. Karl, the academics have to pay court to students these days, not just their more direct paymasters. It's a joke. The odd time I have communicated moral support to academics caught on the wrong side of the PC issue du jour they have expressed their sheer demoralisation at this turn of events. The mob rules.

I hope you're distributing these firearms figures elsewhere Karl, they need to be seen by the babbling social media addicts, because it's often via that avenue that most notice is taken. Anyone lawfully owning a firearm is now being painted as a pseudo-criminal of the psychopathic persuasion. There are the Bewildered Ones however, those who actually want to know the truth, as supported by the facts, as you have published. Good upon you!

It’s not just booze and guns, Karl, it’s a number of legal issues too. You talk about most reporters having university degrees ( obviously not in grammar and syntax) and presumably having some grasp of critical thinking. The impression I have gained over many years is that reporters cluster around academics who appear to relish seeing their names in print (so are all too willing to oblige) rather than necessarily seeking comment from those who might actually know what they are talking about and who have no hobby horse in their stable. I call them them the “go to gurus”. I call to mind the old saying “empty vessels make most noise”. There are exceptions, but all too few. Why it is so common for comment to come from Dunedin rather than anywhere else I do not know. All I can say is that the natural and sensible reticence of Dunedin’s Scottish founders is not much in evidence these days.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.